


got your hand on the button now (show me love)

by moonbeatblues



Series: harder to speak when you're holding the machine [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Descriptions of Injury, F/F, it's not pacific rim i'm so sorry, please listen to friends at the table!! wouldn't have thought of this without it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:21:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23143819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/moonbeatblues
Summary: “Beau,” Dairon says, “I see you have put the cockpit in the stomach.”“Yup,” she says, proud, rocks back on her heels.“Why is that?”“Because no one’s expecting it. You know how standard Empire training goes, no one’s expecting a mech to get decapitated and keep fighting.”(about Beau, and Jester, and mechs)
Relationships: Dairon & Beauregard Lionett, Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett
Series: harder to speak when you're holding the machine [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1672555
Comments: 7
Kudos: 88





	got your hand on the button now (show me love)

**Author's Note:**

> title from when i'm small by phantogram
> 
> i would love desperately to continue this- it's more a partizan or counter/weight au than anything else, and i'm really deep in the paint in looking at mechs right now for my main campaign, but no promises

“Beau?”

The voice is staticky in her comms, and she can’t tell if it’s because the speakers are giving out— they're shit speakers, the fact she’s had them this long is a stupid miracle, stupid on her part, miracle on theirs— or because she just got stabbed.

What’s funny is, she doesn’t think it was supposed to be a fatal blow.

A warning, for sure, but you’re always trained to aim for the head if you’re going for the kill, anywhere else if you’re trying to slow someone down.

That was the point.

(“Beau,” Dairon says, “I see you have put the cockpit in the stomach.”

“Yup,” she says, proud, rocks back on her heels.

“Why is that?”

“Because no one’s expecting it. You know how standard Empire training goes, no one’s expecting a mech to get decapitated and keep fighting.”

“You won’t have a proper vantage point. The head is the intuitive place to pilot from. You don’t move with your stomach first.”

“I’ll learn,” she says. “This is gonna be good, Dairon, I know it. You said to show you something new. This is my new. It’ll be opaque, no one’s gonna know where I am.”

“We’ll make this for you, Beau,” Dairon says, softer. “But what if a stranger wants to pull their punch and you get hurt?”

_Why would someone who doesn’t know me pull a punch_ , she doesn’t say, because she knows it’ll make Dairon’s eyebrows knit together, and they’ll look at her sadly and ask her something like _why don’t you believe people don’t want to hurt you, Beauregard?_

And she won’t know how to answer, and she’ll say something like _isn’t that war? expecting the worst from each other?_ and Dairon will say _we are not soldiers_ , conflicted, like they don’t quite believe it themselves.

They’ll stand there in the same uniform, looking at one another, and get nowhere at all.)

She can still see out the glass beyond the cracks spiderwebbing it— the breached hull light is blinking bright orange, but it’s almost lost now that just about every light is blinking, at different speeds and in different shades, like her cockpit is full of fireflies. The mech in front of her is paused, still in its launching pose, and she wonders if they’ve figured it out, that something’s wrong.

There’s a horrible grinding noise as they retract the trident and she watches, bleak and bleary, as the middlemost prong is pulled back out of her sternum and water starts to flood in from the three holes punched inward.

It’s quiet, for a long moment.

(She cuts the audio cord to her alarms by herself before she takes off that night from Zadash.

It takes some work, finding the panel and playing which-wire-won’t-kill-me, but she does it.

“Beauregard,” Dairon will ask her later, “why is your fuel light silent?”

“Oh,” she says, “yeah. I don’t like the noise. It’s bad enough something’s wrong, you know? Everything getting loud all at once never helps me think.”

And again, Dairon looks at her for a long moment. “Maybe,” she says, “alarms can also be to tell other people that you need help.”)

There’s not much light down here, except for the occasional sweep of headlights. She’d peeled off from the fight to go after the mech that seemed to be fleeing, hadn’t told anyone, and knows they can’t see the infinitesimally faint glow of her lights, not when her mech matches the water, won’t see the crumpled form of Expositor 008 until it’s too late, symmetrical upper and lower halves splayed where she’s fallen, stupid opaque stomach cockpit full of water and empty of life.

She knows the transmitter’s been pierced through, but she presses the comm button anyway, heart sinking under the ensuing crackle. She doesn’t have long, not long enough for whoever asked to find out where she went and get her out.

Water’s climbing her ankles at this point and she fumbles for her belt release, trying not to hyperventilate. The lights start to blink out one by one as their circuits short, and once she’s free of the restraint she leans back in her seat, curls sideways around the wound staining the fabric, spilling dark blood into darker water down below.

Jester’s a healer, but she doesn’t know if there’s a med bay in the world that can restart a heart like they’ll need to.

The mech that had tried to flee stays in front of her for too long, head tilted down in an awkward facsimile of remorse. Then, its thrusters kick on and it launches itself backward, into the dark, and she is alone.

(She looks over the railing at where 008’s last few plates are being fitted. Dairon stands next to her, smile curling traitorously at the corner of her mouth.

It’s strange to see something she’d made realized, strange to think that there are multiple pairs of hands at work, making something for her.

The cockpit is almost invisible, at the junction of all four limbs and painted over the same deep blue as the rest of the mech. It’s a bit bizarre to look at, four perfectly symmetrical limbs, hinged into pairs, with the decoy cockpit the only thing to distinguish the arm pair from the leg pair. The place they all connect is slightly larger than it should be, impossible to fully disguise— it looks like a spider, it looks like something slightly wrong and infinitely dangerous.

“You know, it’s funny,” Dairon says. “It always feels like they look like us, you know?”

“Yeah,” Beau says, and looks to where Expositor 007 is a little ways further down the hangar, sleek and four-limbed but stood rigid and hatched open for repairs. In the artificial lights of the station it looks frozen, a stealthy thing finally caught, but Beau has seen it move, knows how each piston compresses when Dairon lands so they can move silent and fierce. The day they are caught is the day they die, but there is so much that can be done to keep that day from coming.)

What a funny pair they must make, her and 008, crumpled together, slowly blinking out. It’s almost peaceful, watching the shadows shift beyond the cockpit. _Why indeed_ , she thinks, _would a stranger pull a punch_ , and is sad she will never learn.

The water rises to her waist, cold and dark, and it’s when she has her eyes closed that everything is bathed in light.

—

The cockpit of The Traveler comes close enough that the glass touches, like an indirect kiss, and hazily she can see Jester’s panicked face.

She knows what is about to happen, can only watch as the hinge of The Traveler’s cockpit pops and everything depressurizes and Jester pushes at the glass.

For a single moment as it lifts, Jester hovers in front of her in the water, body backlit by The Traveler’s high beams, and her hair lifts around her like a dark cloud, like a halo in negative. Beau has never believed in God, before, but _if divinity exists_ , she thinks, _this is the form it takes_.

Then, Jester is kicking in shards of the cockpit until she has a big enough hole and can pull Beau through. She slides her arms helplessly around Jester’s waist and allows herself to be dragged.

Jester pulls the cockpit closed with a heave and there’s a second as The Traveler starts to whirr where Beau looks at her, panicked, before the water is jettisoned out through the airlock hatches and the ventilation pumps in the air reserve.

They both take loud, gasping breaths, and now that she’s in air again Beau can feel her eyes watering from the pain. She reaches for Jester weakly, and Jester slumps against her in the pilot seat and sobs.

(“I’m always watching,” she says, head tipped into Beau’s collarbone. The air reserve is cold and filtered, and they’re both shaking from it— or, at least Beau is, and she hazily remembers that Jester doesn’t get cold. Jester’s tears are warm on her skin where they fall. “I promise. I’ll always look for you.”

The fight must still be going on, but for them it has ended— she kisses Jester in the faint glow of the traveler’s controls, quiet and cold and still, and thinks that maybe she is done being unseen, that maybe it has always been a choice made when the option to be seen was never given.

Jester shifts them after a while so she’s in the seat and Beau’s in her lap, and takes them back to the surface like that, The Traveler carrying them all— himself, reserves depleted, Beau and Jester, pressed together wet and cold and loving in the pilot’s seat, and Expositor 008 dragged like a doll, a beautiful and broken thing— back home.)

**Author's Note:**

> i'm @seafleece on tumblr! just want to get back to some holistic stuff right now


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